Worst Case Scenario Unfolds During partypoker’s GSSS this Weekend
partypoker spent a lot of time and energy hyping their Garden State Super Series (GSSS) online poker tournament series, particularly this past weekend’s Main Event tournaments. So when six tournaments had to be cancelled, including the Main Events, it was the worst case scenario for partypoker.
The failure is also somewhat symbolic of legal online poker in the U.S. up to this point, which in true P.T. Barnum fashion has promised us a glimpse at a real live unicorn and done nothing more than trot out a goat with a horn glued to its head.
What Happened
The weekend’s events began without a hitch.
Everything was moving along as planned (players were complaining about freezing and disconnects) until the final GSSS tournament of the day was set to begin and players were never seated. At the same time all of the other GSSS tournaments running on the site were paused and partypoker informed players they were working on the problem.
As 15 minutes turned into a half hour, players started to worry, and the forums started to light up.
Then just before 8 PM all GSSS tournaments were closed by the site, and about 45 minutes to an hour later players were refunded by partypoker under their cancelled tournament policy which sees all players still alive in the tournament issued refunds for their buy-ins with the remainder of the prize-pool divvied up as follows:
“50% of the remaining prize pool was distributed equally between the remaining players, and 50% was distributed on a percentage basis according to each player’s chip count.”
In a lengthy explanation by Group Director of Poker for bwin.party, Jeffrey Haas, the fiasco was summed up in the following way:
“We experienced a major system failure last night between 6:50pm to 7:40pm EST on nj.partypoker.com and BorgataPoker.com that affected all running tournaments. This resulted in all running tournaments firstly pausing, but then, eventually leading to them all being cancelled. The technical team did all they could to resume play from the paused state, but unfortunately, due to the nature of this specific bug, there was no way to resume the tournaments.”
Haas went on to explain the technical hiccup that caused the issue, insuring players that the glitch was fixed by the company:
“The system failure was on a key component that manages and schedules tournaments, hence why cash games, fastforward, SNG and casino games were not impacted. The technical teams across partypoker have worked non-stop since it occurred last night to identify and provide a permanent fix for the issue. This has now been deployed today, and the technical teams are confident that we should not experience a recurrence of this very unfortunate event in the future.”
Points to a larger problem in New Jersey
While not uncommon during the early days of the online poker era, or when sites were continually pushing the envelope in terms of the number of players they could support on their servers, this level of technical difficulties is something online poker players no longer expect to encounter in 2014, and highlights the larger issue U.S. players have complained about since Nevada and New Jersey went online: Inferior software.
Also worrisome is how the servers of a site as experienced and large as partypoker failed during what would be a low-traffic day on the global partypoker network.
Or did this have nothing to do with servers, with the issues falling squarely on coding? Perhaps there was an untested and unforeseen glitch in the software brought on by partypoker’s need to conform to the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement’s testing protocols.
Where does partypoker go from here?
It should be noted that partypoker’s handling of the situation was near perfect. Refunds were issued before a huge backlash set in, and the detailed, transparent, response by Haas referenced above should be the model for every other online poker site moving forward.
That being said, this was really bad timing for partypoker. The site (partypoker and Borgata) is trying to hold off Caesars and WSOP.com as the #1 online poker site in New Jersey, and like the rest of the market, is getting ready for the introduction of PokerStars.
These high-profile failings are simply going to drag down the partypoker brand in the New Jersey market and send players to other pastures, whether they are greener or not.
The site has already dealt with its fair share of criticism in NJ, and this situation is only going to offer jilted players another chance to denounce the site and confirm their thoughts of partypoker and Borgata – Confirmation Bias.
Prior to this weekend’s troubles the GSSS was chugging along without an issue, meeting its guarantees and with the events going off flawlessly. Following this weekend’s fumble, partypoker will now have to put this behind them and finish up the GSSS the way they started it. Furthermore, they will have to come up with a new way to reach out to what is likely a very jaded player base.
